If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

After single payer failed, Vermont embarks on a big health care experiment

But Vermont is setting an ambitious goal of taking its alternative payment model statewide and applying it to 70 percent of insured state residents by 2022 which — if it works — could eventually lead to fundamental changes in how Americans pay for health care.

“You make your margin off of keeping people healthier, instead of doing more operations. This drastically changes you, from wanting to do more of a certain kind of surgery to wanting to prevent them,” said Stephen Leffler, chief population health and quality officer of the University of Vermont Health Network.

In Vermont, the goal is to limit the growth in overall annual health care spending to 3.5 percent each year.

The current initiative is Vermont’s second attempt to revolutionize health care. It was the first state in the country to embrace a government-financed universal health-care system but abandoned the plan in late 2014 because of concerns over costs.

Why single payer health care is a terrible option

(CNN)The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is failing. Without regard for consequences, the law expanded government insurance programs and imposed considerable federal authority over US health care via new mandates, regulations and taxes. Insurance premiums skyrocketed even as deductibles rose; consumer choices of insurance on state marketplaces have rapidly vanished; and for those with ACA coverage, doctor and hospital choices have narrowed dramatically. Meanwhile, consolidation across the health care sector has accelerated at a record pace, portending further harm to consumers, including higher prices of medical care.

Almost inexplicably, even more top-down control -- single-payer health care, a system in which the government provides nationalized health insurance, sets all fees for medical care and pays those fees to doctors and hospitals -- has found new support from the left. And this despite its decades of documented failures in other countries to provide timely, quality medical care, and in the face of similar problems in our own single-payer Veterans Affairs system.

Single-payer systems in countries with decades of experience have been proven in numerous peer-reviewed scientific journals to be inferior to the US system in terms of both access and quality. Americans enjoy superior access to health care -- whether defined by access to screening; wait-times for diagnosis, treatment, or specialists; timeliness of surgery; or availability of technology and drugs. As those countries turn to privatization to solve their systems' failures, progressives here illogically pursue that failed model.
And make no mistake about it -- America's most vulnerable, the poor, as well as the middle class, will undoubtedly suffer the most if the system turns to single-payer health care, because they will be unable to circumvent that system.